Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Friends, countrymen, lend me your ears! (and your chicken nuggets) It is I, the Duke of DVD, come 'round once again like that old pair of stained underwear that you used to wipe your leaking dong off because you didn't realize you were out of bedside tissues before you commenced to playing tug of war with cyclops while watching 30 Minute Meals with Rachael Ray. Oh sure, you thought you had tucked the pair far enough under your stained mattress that you would never see it again, but your mom had to go change your sheets while cleaning, and now they're back, so stiff they could stand up on their own. Only this time I must temporarily change my moniker. For the length of this review, I shall be known as the Duke of Blu-Ray! That's right, blu-ray. That future-tech spinning disc designed to hold high resolution copies of the MADdest movies ever. Rest assured, dear readers, that I have a MAD one for you today!

Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead comes to us from that most-beloved-by-the-Duke studio Troma. This time, Troma President Lloyd Kaufman himself is at the helm for what is surely the most fart, sex, and poop jokes ever packed into a movie. Have you ever sat back in your favorite overstuffed chair and thought "Hey, I wish someone, some enterprising individual with more balls than common sense, would craft a movie which involves lots of lesbian action, undead fisting, un-PC comments about suicide bombers, and wrap it all up with a heaping helping of chicken-related sight gags!"? Well, this is your lucky day, punk.

Cling tenaciously to my buttocks as we explore...

Our movie opens with what appears to be every 80's horror movie's cliched opening: two young people are having midnight sex at an Indian burial ground. Now, at the best of times this is quite dangerous, and in more normal movie fare would be the catalyst for all manner of undead goings-on. Instead, Kaufman turns your preconceptions on their head and has undead Native American arms come up to start grasping the coupling naked youngsters, and very quickly we have the first of what will be many fingers/hands inserting into anuses. The use of prosthetic butts in this movie deserves not only an Oscar, but a whole new Oscar category, to which Poultrygeist would be the only entrant.

"Oh baby, your hands are everywhere!"

Every single new scene threatens the use of either something going in or out of an anus, and often delivers on that threat. Before the young couple realize what is going on, an axe-wielding loon steps out of the shadows. The kids run off, leaving underwear behind. The axe-maniac first sniffs the girl's panties, but finds them repulsive. Moving on, he sniffs the dude's underwear, and then begins masturbating (with an obvious prosthetic cock). Suddenly, an arm comes from under the ground, through his anus (didn't see that coming, did ya?), out his mouth, grabs the underwear from his hands, then pulls them back through his body and down into the ground. This is in the first 10 minutes, folks.

"Come for the curse, stay for the food!"

We then cut to a half year later. It seems that a major fast food restaurant called "American Chicken Bunker" has purchased this land and has built a restaurant on it. Arby, the young guy from the opening scene, is returning from college. Arriving at the restaurant, he is greeted by a large group of protesters, holding such signs as "I Love Cock".

"I'm not sure what you lesbians are protesting here, but I support you!"

We also meet her girlfriend Micki, who is attached to a running joke throughout the film in which she is frequently mistaken for a man. We next get the movie's first song and dance number. That's right folks. Not content to have his movie be the most awesome movie ever, Lloyd Kaufman had to go the extra mile and make it into a musical! Another thing Kaufman likes to do is throw stereotypes into people's faces, and he does this quickly by parading out a drunken Native American who the protesters are using as a focus for their anti-corporate hate. This wont be the last stereotype used in the movie I'm thinkin'.

After the musical routine, Arby has scored a job with the American Chicken Bunker. The manager, named Denny, introduces him to another coworker named Carl Jr., whom Arby knew from school. Sensing a pattern with the naming scheme here folks? Other coworkers include Jose Paco Bell, a Latino frycook, and Humus, a burka-wearing cook that is routinely called names like Hamas and Al Jazeera. Jose Paco Bell discovers a box of mutated, pulsating eggs and when he cooks one and serves it, all hell breaks loose. Soon we have mutant chickens running around, one of them pushing Paco Bell into a meat grinder, where he is turned into a burger himself. A sentient burger, who talks with Arby letting him know what is going on and how to stop it.

"What do you mean 'Burkas aren't part of corporate dress code'?!"

Arby is too preoccupied with his girl being a militant lesbian, though. We get a dream sequence in which he is engaged in a threesome with the two girls, and then we get an extended song routine in which the two lesbians (plus about 8 other coeds) are all topless. One thing is for fucking certain: In a Troma film helmed by Mr. Kaufman, you don't have to wait long to see tits.

We next see the arrival of General Lee Roy, the company president. He woos the protesters into his good graces by a hilarious song routine and in no time the restaurant is packed with hungry chicken-lovers. Unfortunately for everyone, the Native American spirits are having none of it, and quickly infect the chicken. I must give props here to the myriad of humorous signs and labels on everything in the restaurant setting. From a drink on the menu called "Cluckwork Orange" to the hundreds of food labels on things in the back storage, the persons responsible for setting up all the, um, sets, deserve to have a pat on the back.

"Hey, I didn't ask for that much special sauce!"

I was constantly laughing at signs like "Instructions For Making The General's 2-Spice Secret Recipe: 1) Add Salt 2) Add Pepper 3) Deep Fry". From here the plots develops rather quickly. Lloyd Kaufman himself plays a grown-up Arby, who we assume has come back from the future somehow to warn Arby that his life is going to suck from there on out unless he leaves American Chicken Bunker. We don't know how Old Arby got there, and we don't care. What we do care about, however, is Lloyd Kaufman in a dress, wearing a g-string, doing a song and dance number. Yes, don't deny it, you DO care about such things!

Nothing says "good cinema" like high-pressure poop squirting.

Next up the chicken MADness continues. We have a grotesque scene involving an obese man (named Jared, supposedly of Subway fame, having fell off the wagon so to speak and gotten fat again) in a bathroom, spraying shit all over the walls. We have Carl Jr fucking a raw chicken carcass, which turns mutant and bites his dong, giving us the choice quotes: "Easy with the teeth! I was gonna pull out, it just felt so goooood!" In fact, this movie is choice quote heaven. Let us pause for a moment and pay homage to these gems:

"I was just trying to help him!""By fucking him to death with a mop?!"

"It's just like my granpappy used to say: 'Hey Junior, get over here with those matches! This cross ain't gonna burn itself!'"

"That's the thing about a chicken. It's got dead eyes. Black. Like a sex doll!"

"The chicken has declared jihad on us all!"

"Eat my meat you vegan whores!"

"How could I ever love someone that wants me to eat cock?!"

"I know him, we were on the debate team together in high school. I was anti-beastiality, he was pro!"

I could go on and on. Suffice it to say, this movie is hilarious to the point of crying. Pretty soon all of the restaurant patrons are chicken zombies, complete with beaks and some feathers. We also have a full-blown mutant chicken, given birth to by General Lee Roy, who swells up like a giant human egg before bursting and spilling for the giant killer chicken. In a hilarious scene right out of some insane person's nightmare, we are whisked around the restaurant as the many zombie-fied chicken people kill, eat, and wax philosophic about various things.

"One Paco Bell burger, coming right up!"

We have an old lady zombie chicken who rips the face off a victim and begins to eat it, declaring "I know it's fattening, but I loooove the skin!" We have a big-tittied woman about to get eaten but when her top comes off she realizes her huge knockers are mesmerizing the chicken zombies and begins to go-go dance on the table top. You can't make this stuff up, people! Oh wait... you can if you are a Troma writer I suppose. At one point, a chicken zombie reaches through the rear end of a patron and pulls his balls out through his ass, then tosses the balls into the deep fryer.

"My momma warned me to not fuck chickens!"

Finally the zombie chicken menace is turned away by simply flipping the "Open" sign to "Closed". This doesn't work forever, though, and in the final scenes the zombie chickens are gunned down with a handy cache of M-16's that were in the restaurant. The giant mutant chicken is still about, as well as other zombie chickens, and so in a scene we saw coming from a long way off, Humus casts off her burka to reveal not only a hot bikini-clad body, but also a suicide bomber's C4 jacket, complete with hand-held trigger device. Troma knows no restraint!

It's, um... finger-lickin' good?

As Arby and Wendy flee the restaurant, Humus blows the whole thing up in a spectacular fireball. Arby and Wendy speed off, accompanied by a young girl that happened to escape with them. Arby gives the little girl a Miller Lite, which she proceeds to chug. In the final seconds, the little girl lays an egg, which causes them all to scream, which causes them to flip their car, which explodes in a massive fiery wreck! Fin.

Needless to say folks, this is easily one of the most crazy, fucked up, insane, balls-the-the-wall AWESOME movies I've ever had the pleasure of watching. No scene fell flat, no one was left unoffended, and no chicken left unkilled.

Now lets talk a bit about this new-fangled blu-ray medium. The picture quality for Poultrygeist was fairly outstanding, with only a blemish here and there. The disc itself is packed with features, including a full-blown making-of that is a must watch.

As per a lot of Troma releases, there is an introductory video (optional) with Lloyd as he talks about this first Troma blu-ray (or brown-ray, as he calls it) release. Not only that, but this is the first Troma movie in anamorphic widescreen! I could go on and on, gushing with praise for this movie. It has everything from a Ron Jeremy cameo to deep-fried testicles. What more could you possibly want?! Nothing, says I. Three Thumbs Way Up for this one, folks. See it. Now.

(Note: a copy of the Blu-Ray release of Poultrygeist was provided to MMMMMovies for review purposes.)

6 comments:

POULTRYGEIST really reads to me like Kaufman's most explicit "fuck you" to the movie industry ever, in a career that has pretty much been one long extended assault. And the odd thing is, that's not a bad thing, in my estimation: love him or hate him, he's definitely a unique figure in modern filmmaking, and has been instrumental in getting many now-established stars, directors, and writers their first crack at the big time. A modern-day Corman? I don't think the comparison is that far off-base.

The movie itself is of course calculated to offend and horrify as much as it is to entertain, in the gloriously unsubtle way that's become Troma's calling card. I don't think there's any middle ground here--you'll either hate it with a fiery burning passion, or you'll go along for the ride with a goofy grin plastered across your face.

I seem to remember there being a push on Troma's part to make this a big-screen release when it was first made--is that addressed on the extras?

@Vicar - I don't recall this being addressed in the extras, but I was quite inebriated by that point, so perhaps it was. It all blended together by that point... I do remember mention of, a chicken, perhaps?

@Nicole - You certainly do need to check this out! Troma films aren't anyone but a select few's cup of tea, but they should be enjoyed by all, I say!

@Jami - Oh dear girl, I wasn't trying to slight those among my dearest readers who have perky funbags, or vaginas, at all! No! As the Vicar can attest, we at MMMMMovies are total fans of female anatomy, if not downright worshipers of such. If my review came off with any sort of penis slant, it was because our good friends at Troma worship the cock in all it's various incarnations. I couldn't help but be phallus-centric. Please don't take offense!

I'm sorry to say i disagree with you. This is a film i hate.I just posted a review today on my blog. check it out. I know a lot of things in this film are meant to be tongue in cheek and funny. but i just didn't get it and to me its seems like a pile of crap. sorry i can't agree on your opinion.